Guy Cassiers on staging 'The Kindly Ones' at Romaeuropa Festival

Belgian director Guy Cassiers (Antwerp, 1960) returns to the Romaeuropa Festival with 'The Kindly Ones,' a theatrical adaptation of Jonathan Littell's controversial novel about the Holocaust told from the perspective of an SS officer. The performance runs October 8-9, 2016 at Teatro Argentina in Rome. Cassiers, known for innovative stagings of European literary classics, has focused his work on power, politics, and history since taking the helm of Toneelhuis in Antwerp. He sees Littell's novel as the culmination of a decade of theatrical research into the relationship between language, politics, and power, with the Holocaust representing the peak of destructiveness and inhumanity. Littell granted rights on condition that no Nazi symbols or uniforms be used, fearing realism could lead to trivialization. Cassiers, who avoids realism in his work, cut the protagonist's family story and psychological aspects to concentrate on the military narrative and Nazi discourse that justified genocide. The set features abstract installations inspired by Christian Boltanski. Cassiers draws parallels between the novel's themes and contemporary Europe, citing Brexit, rising nationalism, racism, and xenophobia. He believes theater's role is to unmask linguistic mechanisms of exclusion and violence.